The Cat's Paw Nebula

Well, that was an adventure in frustration.

In no particular order, the following gremlins tried to stop me getting some imaging done.

• Massive amounts of light pollution keeping the sky bright so I had massive troubles getting the polar alignment right
• My very limited view of the sky - nothing to the north, the house to the south-east, the neighbours to the south-west
• The outside light on next door’s house that kept coming on and turning night into day
• Rolling bands of cloud
• My target being to the west, so it was descending in the sky - where the 2m tall fence is
• Having the wrong white-balance on the camera. HTF did I manage to set it to a custom (5000K) setting???

On the plus side, my light pollution filter arrived from Hong Kong in 1/3 of the estimated arrival time.

And it works so very well - all the nasty hello/brown sky glow is gone from my images. Yay!

After doing battle with various programs to try and remove the awful blue colour from all my images I eventually got this:

I’m not happy with it, but can’t do much more to improve it because of the horrific amounts of noise in the stacked image. (Stacking is supposed to remove the noise, but I must have stuffed something up, somewhere, as it was just shocking.)

To see the difference a dark-sky site makes, check out image 3 in the ‘Nebulae and Galactic Core’ page - the Cat’s Paw is at the top-centre of the image.

Roll-on the end of lockdown and the ability to get somewhere dark!!

• Astro